End of Week 4

Goals:
To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook. 

Prepare yourself for a lot of data-heavy blog posts in the next few days as I complete my background data analysis on the Year 9's who arrived at Tamaki from our Manaiakalani feeder schools!

• Visits to the gym this week: still 0. I left a meeting at 5.30 on Thursday keen to go to the gym, but by the time I reached it at 6.30 after a frustrating hour in traffic I just wanted to go home. So I kept on driving.
• McDonald's eaten: 1 Happy Meal combo and McFlurry (mostly because I wanted the Roald Dahl book they were giving away in place of a toy).
• Casual sports games played this week: 4 games of touch throughout the week.
• Books read: Firewall by Andy McNab after talking to Staff Cairns about his favourite books. I can see why armed service-people enjoy this book! It was a little too heavy on operational details for me, but the story was interesting. 

• Teaching highlights: 
• Printing and cutting up this Excellence answer to review (and help learn) the third section of the Human Evolution exam, which students had to shuffle into the correct order using colour first, then semantic clues such as topic sentences and clues like "firstly," "the second piece of evidence" or links between sentences, and then finally order the paragraphs into an essay using the bullet points in the question to structure it.
• Next, students read through the full answer and wrote down words that they didn't know the meaning of onto big whiteboards. As I moved around I noticed these included both biological and just general English words. Some frequent ones written were: 
• Concurrently (con- means with or thoroughly, current relates to time or now.. with each other in time)
• Vaguely (sort of, kind of, slightly)
• Simultaneously (at the same time)
• Cohabitation (co- means together, habitat is a living space... living together)
• mtDNA 
• y-Chromosome
• Carbon dating
• I moved around the room explaining the words, and then went and created this doc that we'll come back to today.
• Year 13's took the initiative to write down notes about the evidence to support each of the two theories of human dispersal, half of Year 12 asked more questions while the other half tried to avoid any further learning.
• In response to that, I think it would be useful to get the Year 12 students to un-shuffle the answer a second time and record a quick summary of information from it. I'm hoping the second run at the activity will build more confidence.

• CoL things: I presented my data at the first CoL meeting of the year and received positive feedback and interest. That was nice. I'm going to ask Kathryn if I can present at the next staff meeting too.

• HSA things: Went to a meeting on Thursday morning with other Academy Directors and finally found out what other HSA are doing, and left feeling much more calm. We have our first guest coming to speak with students on Tuesday, and the fono with whānau next week :)

• Teacher well-being support: nothing this week because of the rain on Friday :( although Vaughn was ready to take people for a walk up Maungarei while I was busy flying to Nelson for my mother-in-law's 60th birthday!

• Gratitude emails sent: more this week, 4 I think. And 4 RISE cards too. 

Week 3..

Goals:
To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook. 

These posts don't relate to my CoL role by the way, which is ticking away in the background. When my data analysis is complete it will deserve it's own blog post!

• Visits to the gym this week: still 0. Why am I paying for a membership!?
• McDonald's eaten: 1 - BLT bagel and a coffee when I needed to work right up until 8.28am.
• Casual sports games played this week: 3 games of touch, 3 games of tag and 9 Rounds with a friend on Saturday morning.
• Books read: Past Tense by Lee Child. It got skim read because half of the plot was boring. 

• Teaching highlights: 
• Going to the zoo with Year 13!

Everyone up and looking at skeletons and skulls

Tauola, Gloria, Maia and Paige trying to determine the species of their skull.

Keti, Loma and Alisi also puzzling.

Giant Galapagos tortoise! He was out and about while his buddy slept in the mud.

The elephant was an exciting find because she was feeding!

The mark of a good trip - 18 people out of 32 fell asleep on the ride home! It was very hot.

• CoL things: I ran data for about 4 and a half hours on just one cohort, across one year, on only Reading Comprehension. Not Vocab, not Writing, not Maths... just Reading Comprehension. Stay tuned for findings soon!
• Teacher wellbeing support: organised the "Great Tamaki Bakeoff" which only Shirly and Karen baked cookies for. Trina ran the voting at interval. While only 2 baked, definitely more people than that enjoyed the cookies :)
• Gratitude emails sent: only 2 again.

Manaiakalani Online Secondary Connect

Today I was the guest speaker on a Manaiakalani Google Hangout.

 I was suprised how easy and effective Hangouts were with one person as the MC making sure people's microphones were all off when they weren't speaking, giving time for asking questions, and keeping the discussion moving. 

I spoke about how my sites and visible planning have evolved over the last 3 years. 

I also mentioned Google Class OnAir, and the Spark MIT inquiry I've been doing this year, and where to find my resources, lesson plans and sites.

This video was also on the page I presented, but I left it for anyone to watch it in their own time. Secretly I am quite proud of it! It's a summary of my year of inquiry with Year 13 Biology, focussing on improving University Entrance.

It's 7 minutes 33 but I promise it moves along at a cracking pace :)

We finished the Google Hangout with a collaborative Padlet, asking for tangible suggestions on how collaborative teaching and learning communities could be build up among secondary schools. 

Hui Reflection Term 3

Today in the hui we each provided five principles that we thought would be important to tell a new teacher about teaching with technology. Then we all went through and analysed the underlying assumption of each given principle. 

Here are my five principles, analysed by the people in the hui for assumptions:

Principles	Assumptions
Establish a routine for disconnecting from the technology when you want to communicate with the class (e.g. slant devices, remove headphones, eyes on you etc).	that classroom management is important - with or without technology
For introducing or reviewing new content, try to evaluate online videos/interactives/simulations/activities that are able to be paused and rewound, or that provide immediate feedback to students on how they are going.	Teachers can inherently spot the learning value in different tools. Teachers know best how to teach. Having learning student-paced helps students learn. Immediate feedback helps students to learn. Teachers have time to wade through the offerings on the web
Pick ONE platform for all of your visible planning/explanations/resources/work distribution and stick to it throughout the year - an online routine or online learning zone. It is VERY confusing to bounce from gmail to bio folder to short goo.gl links etc to find your work.	that teachers have sufficient confidence and courage of their convictions to go with just one and not be swayed by the brighter and better rhetoric that this doesn’t then lock you into something that is old, useless, boring or superseded by something flasher. That students can’t handle different platforms easily
It is just as good to have an online presence on all of the student’s work (having all their docs open, leaving comments and repeatedly cycling through their work) during class time. They know you’re watching and helping.	-that students like feedback -that teachers appreciate the value of giving feedback -that feedback is critical to learning -that students like to be monitored
Use technology to share planning and learning progressions with colleagues in an organised way, as well as recording student data by having links to student work in one place.	several teachers are teaching together/ in the same place/ same school/ on same project. teachers believe in sharing information

Hui Reflection Day 1

Today I was at the first day of a two-day hui for the "evolving pedagogies when teaching with digital technologies" project being funded by the University of Auckland.

The main discussion point for this morning is preparing our students for their future. What does that look like and sound like currently, and what does it hope for and assume?


Thoughts about knowledge valued by the school system:

• Is knowledge still power? We think so, but the nature of knowledge is constantly changing. 
• What is the power of having knowledge in your head v knowledge in your device, knowing something v knowing how to find out, knowing what you know v knowing when to Google. 
• The role of the teacher has changed from transmitting to facilitating knowledge building. 

Thoughts about curriculum, choice and learning:

• Students learn best when they're learning about something they see as interesting or relevant. 
• Following student interest and passions in learning v forcing students to experience new content (and form neural connections) that the education system has determined to be important.
• What age is appropriate for students to exclusively follow their existing curiosity and passion, so they are not limited learners later in life?
• Following on from that, is there a basic level of learning and knowledge that students NEED and would be lost without; for example, are times tables necessary any more? 

Thoughts about other things valued by the school system?

• Skills required in the workplace such as cooperation.
• Skills required to succeed in the current economy such as creativity.
• Dispositions such as curiosity, love of learning and resilience in the face of difficulty.
• Expanding students' options for their future (whatever that may look like).

Thoughts about teaching:

• We are in a new age of access; teaching is one of the only careers where professionals consistently work outside of working hours and teachers need to consider when they are available and when they aren't.
• In schools there seems to be a discord between innovation and mastery; moving always to the next next next idea/tool/programme before teachers can master the last, reducing consistency in their teaching.
• Collaboration and sharing between teachers/departments/schools could reduce workload.
• Universities do not model this and instead focus on competition to the detriment of all. 

Research and Soapbox

This morning I am in at Epsom Campus at the Faculty of Education, observing Dawn Garbett teaching her 614 course to fledgling science teachers. My job this morning is to observe in the "video camera" style - recording what I see, hear, notice and think during her lesson. 

My particular focus is on pedagogical underpinnings, on and off task behaviour with devices, proficiency with devices, when students are most and least engaged, and anything that interests me. 

This is part of a research project aimed to help all of us in the research group reflect on and improve our practice, particularly around the use of devices in class. 

The main digital tool utilised in Dawn's very practical, excellent, investigatory (which chips are the crunchiest, which are the oiliest, design an investigation, GO!) lesson was gosoapbox.com; a site that I will investigate further later today as it has the fascinating feature of a confusion-meter for people to anonymously confess their confusion online!

Gosoapbox.com also has quiz, poll and discussion features, although the thread on the discussion board doesn't appear to allow people to respond to others' comments, unlike a blog or Google+, or numerous other tools. 

As I sit here and make "critical friend" comments on my notes of Dawn's lesson I wonder how I can be more purposeful in my selection and use of tools, and the benefits they provide for my students.